Lily Dale (16 page)

E
very morning at ten to nine, I stumbled down Cleveland Avenue with my eyes still puffy from sleep. Nights went late at Shelley's house, and once in bed, I usually couldn't sleep. I'm a good sleeper outside the Dale, but insomnia plagued me on every visit to the Spiritualist camp. Once when I mentioned my troubles to Neal Rzepkowski, Lily Dale's physician-medium, he said I needed to get away from the Dale to break the intensity. I followed that advice twice, and, sure enough, when I came back I could sleep.

Hardly anybody in Shelley's house got up before ten, and I usually asked myself why I did as I walked in the door of the Assembly Hall and took my seat in the Reverend Anne Gehman's class for spiritual enfoldment. Mornings were cool, and I often shivered through my sweater as the cold metal of the folding chair hit my back. I crossed my arms to keep warm and then uncrossed them to avoid looking closed and disapproving. Old portraits of women in high-necked dresses and men with bushy beards glowered down on us. Newer portraits from the thirties through the fifties looked more welcoming. Plump women smiled benignly, and men in suits stared into the camera with great confidence.

I picked Anne's class because of Hilda's recommendation. Students who attended her class the year before said a heavy four-
legged table floated around the room completely off the ground. I'd go for that. I'd go for a little ectoplasm, a few hazy spirit forms—even a bent spoon might convince me if I did it. So far all I'd heard were secondhand tales.

Anne was often already sitting in front, perfectly turned out in an elegant, ankle-length dress, her hands in her lap. She liked to have a few moments of quiet meditation to prepare herself, a student told me. Once the class started, she stood behind the lectern where Sunday speakers for the Church of the Living Spirit delivered their morning addresses. Spiritualists never call those talks “sermons.” That sounds too churchy. They like to emphasize that they are skeptics and freethinkers, just as earlier Spiritualists were. Spiritualism scientifically proves the afterlife, according to one Spiritualist principle.

For 150 years, believers have completely ignored the fact that the great majority of scientists think Spiritualism is nonsense and hasn't proven anything except that vast numbers of people are foolish and credulous. Anne made much of Spiritualism's scientific credentials. A Canadian journalist in the class tried to reason with her on that point, but it was no use. Anne slid right past him, as I knew she would. Spiritualists are a lot more practiced at dealing with skeptics than most amateur skeptics are at dealing with them. I never saw a Spiritualist get angry or yield a bit of ground. They just fuzz the issue.

I'm not saying they mean to. Other religious people do the same when faced with disbelief. Even when believers earnestly explain how things are and disbelievers earnestly listen, disbelievers go away unchanged because facts are the least of their differences. It's perception that separates them.

That's how it is, and that's how it has always been. Those who must see to believe don't believe enough to see. And those who believe enough to see won't stop believing, no matter what they
see. One of the most famous experiments in psychic phenomena tested that truism and has been repeated many times. It indicated that people who think psychic power is possible score higher than normal on tests of such power, while people who don't score lower than normal. A later experiment with Mensa subjects indicated that extrasensory perception and other psychic phenomena, often called PSI, may be less common among people with high IQs. One interpretation is that intelligence tests often rely on what's called left-brain thinking, while PSI relies on right-brain perception. People who excel at left-brain thinking may reject interference with their reasoning powers—or they may be too smart to fall for such hooey.

Anne told the Canadian that he needed to read the hundreds of experiments that started in the 1800s and continue to this day. Researchers have documented plenty of strange things. Some of the most extensive tests and documentation were conducted by the British Society for Psychical Research. The society's presidents included three Nobel laureates, ten fellows of the Royal Society, one prime minister, and numerous physicists and philosophers. One of them, Sir Oliver Lodge, was among the outstanding physicists of the nineteenth century. His experiments with the transmission of drawings from one person to another person are somewhat like those of Upton Sinclair and even more astonishing.

Investigators for the British and American Societies for Psychical Research recorded thousands of cases of psychic phenomena. Researchers often tracked down other observers and witnesses and looked for every possible way that the evidence could have been faked. They found a lot of cheating, imaginative projections, and willingness to be duped, but they also found evidence that's pretty interesting. Professor Gilbert Murray, twice president of the British society, experimented for at least twenty years with thought transference. He would go outside his parlor and shut the door, while
inside his guests would think of a subject and write down a description. Then the professor would return and tell them what they had written down. Out of the first 505 experiments, 60 percent were hits, according to those who participated.

In the middle of the 1900s, J. B. Rhine at Duke University conducted what are probably the most famous experiments in mental telepathy. He devised a set of symbols printed on playing cards. In some tests, the experimenter would look at the card as the test subject tried to guess what was on it. In other tests, the experimenter, who was sometimes in another room, would lift each card without looking at it, and place it face down in another stack. Dr. Rhine's tests showed that some testers could identify far more cards than was likely to occur randomly. One particular subject, a ministerial student, was so good he became something of a star.

But Rhine had a problem he couldn't overcome. Accuracy declined if a test went on too long, and even the best testers lost overall accuracy as they continued testing over weeks and months. The ministerial student held his record longer than anyone else. Then his girlfriend dumped him. Plunged into depression, he lost his psychic concentration entirely and never regained it.

J. B. Rhine didn't give up. He continued to experiment with PSI, but the national excitement generated by his early findings dwindled when other investigators had trouble reproducing his findings.

One of my favorite experiments was conducted by an Austrian, Paul Kammerer, who thought that the universe operates on a principle of unity that draws like to like. From the age of twenty until the age of forty, he kept a log of coincidences. Carl Jung also kept such a record of his patients' responses to coincidences, which he said were amazingly strong. Kammerer believed that coincidences occur without physical cause and in groupings. To prove that, he would sit for hours in public parks, classifying people who passed
using criteria such as sex, age, dress, or even such trivial matters as whether they carried umbrellas or parcels. Controlling for such factors as weather and time, he found, for example, that on a given day he would see a far higher number of groups of three, while on another day a higher number of foursomes made up of two men and two women would stroll past. He believed this data showed that like attracts like, demonstrating that a principle of unity exists in the universe. Later Jung and quantum theory giant Wolfgang Pauli worked together on a theory of synchronicity, which more or less fit with Kammerer's observations.

Modern researchers at Princeton University have documented times when thoughts were able to affect the operation of highly calibrated machines. They also found many examples of people being able to transmit mental pictures of scenes to others.

Critics say all the studies showing PSI are faulty. Even supporters admit that many of them have not been duplicated. And both sides must concede that the effects shown are relatively small. Many are so small that they show up only when thousands of tests are run.

In addition, some of the PSI claims are so weird that even the open mind wants to click shut. Anne Gehman, for instance, mentioned to the Canadian journalist that scientists in the 1800s weighed mediums before and after ectoplasm came from their bodies, and the mediums had actually lost weight after the manifestations. Anne was right. I read experiments where gooey streams of ectoplasm were coming out of people's noses and ears and who knows what other orifice. Sometimes, observers showed that the stuff was made of cheesecloth and glop. Other times, they weren't able to find out what it was, and they did weigh people, but those experiments were like all the others. Maybe they proved something, maybe they didn't.

Like journalist Arthur Koestler, I find all the evidence for paranormal phenomena to be “unfortunate,” because some of it pushes
me toward belief and I don't want to go there. I like the universe to be rational and predictable. I like reality to be something that we can all more or less agree upon. Unlike Koestler, who analyzed the evidence and came away convinced that something beyond consensus reality was going on, I was not convinced by the evidence pro or con. Probably that is because I will never be able to analyze all of the data myself and I don't trust either side. No matter what I read, one part of my mind is saying, “Yes, but…”

William James believed that it might take one hundred years to come to grips with the realities of psychic occurrences, but that we finally would. Science as it is usually conceived “will look small for its insistence that only what it can measure, only that which is material can exist,” he believed. He was wrong about that, so far.

His own description of psychic phenomena might explain why scientists have had little luck tracking it. “These experiences have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous, and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.”

 

T
he day Harry Houdini came to Lily Dale, he paid his gate fee and headed straight for slate-writing medium Pierre Keeler's house at the edge of the lake on Cottage Row. Nobody remembers the exact date, because the Dale's official histories don't record that Houdini ever came to the community; but Ron DeChard's mother lived in Lily Dale during the mid-1920s, when Houdini was earning his self-applied title as the “scourge of spirit mediums,” and she told her son the story.

Everyone in town feared the flamboyant little magician and was on the lookout for him, she told Ron. He made headlines by showing up in mediums' parlors in a fake beard and mustache and wearing thick glasses. Once he figured out a medium's tricks,
the magician would rip the disguise from his face and shout, “I am Houdini! And you are a fraud.”

The renowned magician and escape artist faked Spiritualist tricks himself early in his career and later befriended one of Lily Dale's most famous physical mediums, Ira Davenport. Mr. Davenport's specialty was a spirit cabinet. He or his brother would be bound in a chair inside the cabinet. Once the door was shut, raps, tambourine rattles, and bell ringings were heard. Ghostly hands came from openings in the cabinet. The act garnered international fame for the brothers, and no one could figure out how they did it.

Houdini said Davenport revealed the secret of his tricks and told him that the brothers never made contact with spirits. Later Houdini refined their methods in his famous escape stunts.

That might have been all the contact Houdini would ever have with Spiritualism, but, in 1913, his mother died. The magician's grief was enormous.

“What would be more wonderful to me than to be able to converse with my beloved mother?” he wrote. “Surely there is no love in this world like a mother's love, no closeness of spirit, no other heart throbs that beat alike; but I have not heard from my blessed Mother, except through the dictates of the inmost recesses of my heart, the thoughts which fill my brain and the memory of her teachings.”

Some people think his fierce hatred of phony Spiritualists came from his rage and disillusionment because they couldn't bring his mother's spirit to him. When he became friends with one of Spiritualism's most famous and ardent converts, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini tried contacting his mother through Conan Doyle's wife, who sometimes gave readings via automatic writing, a form of mediumship in which spirits supposedly guide what's written.

The Conan Doyles believed their spirit contact with Houdini's mother was real, but the message was a disappointment to Hou
dini. It began with Mrs. Conan Doyle drawing the figure of a cross, something Houdini's mother would never have instigated because she was Jewish, the wife of a rabbi. The writing continued with an insipid, unspecific message in English. Houdini's mother didn't speak a word of English.

When Houdini expressed his doubts to Conan Doyle, the author replied that his wife always drew the shape of a cross at the beginning of her messages. Conan Doyle's confidence in Spiritualism was so strong that he believed Houdini himself was more than a mere magician and said that his tricks could only be accomplished with spirit help, which the fame-seeking magician hid so that he could take all the credit.

At one point during a carriage ride, Houdini showed Conan Doyle a simple trick often done for children in which the magician's thumb seems to disappear. According to Houdini, the creator of the ultrarational detective Sherlock Holmes was as impressed as any child. The two finally fell out in bitter public arguments.

Poor Pierre Keeler. Or lucky Pierre, depending on your perspective. By the time Houdini got to him, Keeler had been exposed over and over again, but each time he outlasted his critics and kept working. After Houdini threw off his disguise in his usual flamboyant way, he left Keeler's house and began knocking on doors, according to Ron's story. But word spread faster than Houdini could walk. Lily Dale's mediums all locked their doors and hid. Finally, realizing that his prey had gone underground, Houdini left Lily Dale.